The Cat Came Back...

...the very next few months later!

I'm back. Three weeks ago, my portfolio was PHAT. Now it's... not.

BUT-- I have a ton of new stuff to post about, not least of which is my starting a side business! All legit, legal and everything. I'm like dang! So I'll be posting step-by-steps here on the way for my new Limited Liability Corporation.

In the meantime, I just want to commend Capital One, 5/3, HSBC, and every other freaking bank out there trying to get me to sign up for your freaking credit cards. They're all business cards, and they showed up at my doorstep-- I kid you not-- like THREE DAYS after I filed the LLC papers! I was truly impressed. And annoyed. But at the very least, I had something to take my mind off this financial stalking.

I'm in love. Ah...

How You Cat Can Help Grow Your Business

Leap Year! Leapt!

Here's an interesting cat-business article:

How Your Cat Can Help You Grow Your Business by Cary Bayer

Mind, it's for a massage therapy business. I don't think #3 will help my business much ("let others touch you"). But, it got me thinking: how has Zooey taught me to grow our business? After all, she's a singular cat, not like the others.

Hmmmm.

1. Eat Those Smaller Than You. Zooey's an outdoor cat, and spends much of her time in that primordial cat-space unbeknown to sweater-wearing, Juicy Vittles-eating Mr MacMuffin next door. She lives in a Darwinian world, and would read Sun Tzu's Art of War were she so inclined. Many businessmen have benefited from its ruthless take on the business world, I must say. Were my cat a Fortune 500, M&As would rule the day.
   
2. Always Be Clean, Fresh, and Ready to Go. Though an outdoor cat, Zooey spends a lot of time tongue-primping. She's always fresh and shiny, with a well-groomed coat. I try to do the same: presentation matters, and first impressions last a lifetime for those of us who don't suffer concussions right after the first impression.
3. Keep on that Poker Face. Zooey loves me. How do I know? Good question. Best evidence so far is that she hangs around, eats the food I offer, and lives in the house I provided for her. Other than that, she's pretty standoffish. I get a "meow" now & then, but that's about it. In business, too, it's best not to be too forthcoming. Don't be a cold fish, but remember that a business relationship, however warm, is not a friendship. If you don't, you may wind up feeling betrayed down the line.

Or eaten. Yikes!

Keeping It Real (and Legal)

Having read-- and argued with-- and learned from-- Tim Ferris' Four Hour work Week, I now have a much better sense of what the possibilities are with monetizing my cat.

And as I learned from the Cash Machine anti-PF book, I think must set up a structure. We often overlook this in thinking of entrepreneurship. We think, "it's not about paperwork, but hard work; not LLCs, but sweat and sore knees."

But I want to be a more thoughtful CATpitalist. One who knows from the start that he can grow. After all, you can't lay a foundation for a ranch house and put a skyscraper on it. And I want CATpitalism to stretch to the skies.

So I am investigating various legal structures-- before I talk to a lawyer at $800 a minute! These NOLO legal books-- written by lawyers, and intended as legal advice (though more limited than an in-person lawyer)-- have helped me think about this a LOT. My basic options:

• Sole Proprietorship. Which is what it is now, just money added to my taxes. If I want to sell the business, I can't. And all the profits go straight to my personal taxes.
• Partnership. My cat and I share! Moving along...
  
• Limited Liability Corporation. Your personal assets don't get nailed should your business go bankrupt. Whew! Profits still passed on to your personal taxes. Owned by its members.
• Corporation. Both types are owned by their shareholders-- with a board of directors making decision. Shareholders have no personal liability.
  
• C-Corporation. The standard, with profits able to be held at the corporate level to reduce overall taxes. Also, it has arcane "capital incentives..." Ooo, impressive...
  
• S-Corporation. This is a mutt: half-LLC (for taxes), half C-Corp (for structure). Has no more than 100 shareholders. Too much passive income, like rent money coming in, can get you in hot water with the tax-dogs.
  

And remember: I am not legal advice! I'm learning this stuff as I go along. And I may hold serve as a Sole-P for a while yet. Need to read the tea leaves...

Get POOR Fast

How NOT to Monetize Your Cat: a Case Study.

Down the street lives Purrty Petey. He has a human named Anton he keeps with him, who's jumps from job to job, scheme to scheme.

The human tries to make money every which way. Rather than get DVDs from the library, he buys them, burns them for his collection, and then resells them used on eBay. Rather than invest in bonds or an index fund, he speculates on collectibles and eBay. (Mouldering Beanie Babies infest his rented storage unit.)

Worst of all, rather than invest in learning new skills for higher pay, he spends tons of time and money on Get Rich Quick schemes. You know them-- promising huge returns on real estate, Forex trading, options, or some "foolproof" product, they have infomercials and hotel conferences. Anton's been to a dozen of these things. He goes for the $1995! $995! $500! "free" seminar, but then they upsell books, CDs, home training courses and networking.

Dozens of these courses litter his apartment. Purry Petey uses them for litter. He has to. Anton's too busy chasing some other fake dream.

Worst of all, Purry Petey tries to tell him. He tears up the couch, he pukes in the undies drawer. (Once he was asleep in it, and Anton closed it on him. For a week after, he was a guilty "commando.") Anton won't sit down with himself long enough to see how he's wasting his time-- his life-- on some other empty promise. He could be monetizing his cat, building side streams of income, taking small steps to financial & feline freedom, but he doesn't read this blog.

Alas!

REVIEW: 4 Hour Work Week

So this guy says you only have to work FOUR HOURS a week.

Yeah, RIGHT! Good luck hopping off to Bora Bora when you've got a CAT to take care of! For God's sake, who changes the litter? Well, Zooey's an outdoor cat, so I guess there is no litter. What will the cat eat, Tim Ferris? Huh? Dirt? Floorboards? MICE? Or do you just outsource it to your neighbors? But then you have to draw up a 1099 for them, and they're just your freaking NEIGHBORS! And what if they're from some third-world country where they EAT cats? Did your "Muse" design ever think of THAT? New clause in muse design: "in case of the "help" eating Zooey, FREAK THE LIVING CRAP OUT AND THROW Mr. TIM FERRIS'S BOOK IN THE REACTOR CORE."

Oh, who am I kidding, I'll never have "help." Or even help.

The "Muse," by the way, is the online business Mr. Tim Ferris has designed so he doesn't have to work. The book has a lot of random stuff about not reading email and speaking Indonesian, but really it's about how he made an e-business selling herbal jujuberries to men who punch each other in the face for money. He had also punched men in the face as a hobby, so he had an "in."

It lets him disappear into the Third World for months at a time and still make money while having other people do all the work. I think he's NUTS. I think he got his ideas at the CIRCUS. I think his name is Mr. TIM FERRIS WHEEL. HA! How you like THOSE jujuberries? I guess this is the part of the review where I should attack his character just because he has a life I'd like to have. Well, Mr. WHEEL, I am not the first person to say that taking other people's work for money is evil. I think Karl Marx said it somewhere down the line!

Okay, to his credit, he makes his money selling "nutraceuticals," not investment systems or speeches about how great money is. So his recent turn as a entrepreneur selling entrepreneurship is not as foul as most of the other money/finance/work gurus out there. Even better, he puts it all in the book, not a three-day, $1995 $995 $495! limited time offer! workshop. And he seems smart, and earnest, though perhaps a little too pleased with himself.

And he has some good notions about designing the business, even if they're a little light on particulars. (While reading, I was like, "I can do this!" Afterwards, I'm not too sure.) And his language-learning pronouncements seem on the level. (I personally became fluent in Tabby only after creating an immersion environment, looping tapes of Zooey meowing until I was dreaming in Standard Cat first, then Tabby and Siamese.)

Meanwhile, I think Zooey has like a four-minute work week. She meows at the door when she wants feeding, but the rest of the time she's out doing her thing. I mean, it's not like Haggis, my friend Chevron's cat, who actually has to produce love and affection every now and then. Zooey never sleeps coiled up at my feet. Well, she was a stray. She had a hard life before we met. I guess I should just be happy she's willing to help out around the house: catching mice, being monetized, etc.

I wonder if Mr. Wheel has any pets. Does he hire people to love them? Do they hire other pets-- you know, scraggly pets nobody wants, like fat chihuahuas and echidnas and billygoats, to love the hired people back? What happens then, does everyone just sit around while all the love takes place everywhere else? What happens if we run out of pets who are less loved than the "New Rich" pets who don't feel any fear and so don't work for love?


Is love a renewable resource? I need to research this.

How This Book Made Me Feel Stupid and Lame, Which Seems to be Part of the Author's Purpose in Talking All the Time about How Great He Is and All the Cool Stuff He Did by the Age of 15 When I Still Had a Mullet:

• The Author left his six-figure job, which I never had in the first place, so now he can look down on me twice
  
• I'm not so convinced of my own abilities that I didn't write a book about The Four-Cat Work Week first
• I didn't get a BA from Princeton, or even Squireton. Can I still achieve something in the world, or should I just quit now?
  
• I didn't go to Stanford either. Neither did the author, but he has spoken there, and, being in Palo Alto, is kind of at the center of this "New Rich" world of venture capital and internet gazillionaires. I think part of the point of said institution is just looking down on people because your mascot is a tree named after a bird, and you can thereby spend the rest of your life in a state of reassuringly smug condescension when everyone in the sane world mistakes the word "Cardinal" for a cardinal. Also, you know you'll never really go deep in the NCAA's.

How This Book Made Me Feel Like Zooey When She Huffs a Bunch of Catnip:

• A lot of the eMarketing stuff seemed familiar, so I guess I'm doing something right
• I don't like to travel, so I don't mind spending EVERY WAKING MINUTE making CATpitalism! your one-spot stop for cat-related monetization
  
• I love my cat too much to outsource her
  

(Disclosure: Author owns Chevron [CVX] stock, but not very much.)

REVIEW: Cash Machine for Life

Loral Langemeier flips the proverbial bird at the average personal finance blogger. She writes,

If you want to sit around counting pennies and live a smaller, have-to life, then focus on your debt. In fact, I promise you that if you spend the next year focused on getting your debt down to nothing, you will have exactly that at the end of the year-- nothing. Focusing on debt is like dieting without exercise. It's an endless cycle of starvation and deprivation with no lasting results. (pg. 3)

And, since I'm one of the rare few who made it a point never to carry either school or credit card debt, I can kind of see where she's coming from. She continues:

A colleague of mine drinks three iced quad venti nonfat no-whip mochas a day. His monthly coffee habit is some people's car payment.

She neglects to mention his heart exploded from caffeine overload, and even the EMS crew left the scene buzzing, only to get run over by the Maserati-driving barrista who profited from his loss.

Anyway, Langemeier has written three (3) books with "Millionaire" in the title. How's that working for you, Loral? The latest one is about creating a "Cash Machine for Life." She outlines this with her proprietary (her word) Wealth Cycle (string of trademarks here), which is our first warning sign. Always beware authors , talking about money, who have clearly made that money by talking about making money (I include my cat in that group), or worse yet, selling a proprietary system that makes you money.

Langemeier does, as seminars and exclusive networking opportunities. They look better than those "Millionaire Cat" seminars, where you point at your cat and yell, "I HAVE A MILLIONAIRE CAT!" But they still leave me a little wary.

Fortunately, her book is useful, mainly for how it defines "Cash Machine." It is NOT a pie-in-the-sky great idea, like franchising MMA CATpitalism interactive scratching post sellers all through the world. It IS, however, a laundromat. Or a car wash. It has to make money NOW. And it should be related to what you already know, not what you want to know. So for me, it's not DOGpitalism-- no, I know cats, so I should focus my energies there. For instance, start a consulting business where I explain to cat owners how to realign their portfolios into cat-friendly equities.

To build a Cash Machine, she emphasizes the fast & the practical. Two ideas stand out: "Seven Weeks to Sales" and the necessity of NOT being a "Lone Ranger." I never watched Westerns, so I'm glad she explained that she meant to find a mentor, a model, and to get other people to cover your weaknesses. I, for instance, am bad with setting things on fire, so I would outsource that to a contractor. If my Cash Machine for Life involved setting things on fire. Which it doesn't.

The "Seven Weeks to Sales" walks through a process not just of coming up with a business, a plan, and a team, but a structure. You have to make it a legal entity. For her model, it's non-negotiable. That way, you can expand it, hire others to do the work, and-- most importantly-- sell it later.

She gives some web extras that deserve mention. One, a PDF of Cash Machine ideas, lists 25 pages' worth of every job known to humankind. A sample:

• Pick-up kids from school
• Tutoring
• Pet Psychic
• Advertising Coach
• Personal Assistant Service
• Mobile Coffee Truck
• House Sitting
• Pet Sitting
• Flower Shop
  

It is so encyclopedic as to be quite useless, and kind of thoughtless. I can't imagine she expects anyone will read it.

So, fair enough. Some other books cover similar ground, but not with her emphasis on the nuts-and-bolts. Business organization and legal structure are perhaps the most important part, but books like The Four Hour Work Week flit right past them. She gives them due attention. You'll still have to hire an accountant or a lawyer, but at least you'll know what to ask.

IN SUM:

How This Book Gave Me the Gout, a Misunderstood Disease Not Just for the Old Rich:

• The "proprietary" nonsense. It's a sound set of principles, but a "process" only so she can sell it-- so it's jargon-heavy. I can't stand jargon, and having not yet read her other two books, much of this book is rougher going than it has to be.
• The organization. She relies a lot on stuff from her Cash Machines Seminars, so the book can be needlessly hard to follow. In other words, should I just take the seminar? Well, I'm not interested in furthering your Cash Machine, because those kinds of things are always fluff. It's a good time management principle: AVOID MEETINGS. In my book, Seminar = Meeting.
• Learn to write better or spend more for your ghostwriter, whichever it is. If this book is a bestseller, it's because people want money, not because you can write your way out of a wet paper bag.
  

How This Book Fed My Cat Delicious Tunafish:

• Has a sense of the legal ramifications of business-- what other money-machine book talks about due diligence?
• She's right about getting rich. So many people have long-term plans to retire rich, but in the meantimes they bend over backwards to pinch pennies. Rather, building more income streams-- especially passive ones-- makes more sense.
  

Cat Skills Assessment

As many of you know, my cat Zooey has decided to help out monetarily. But she's become discouraged after her initial enthusiasm. It is hard to find work in this world, especially when you're a cat.

Yesterday she threw up all over the deck. I was worried-- stress is pretty bad, and now the deck is too. I could hear her up late last night. When I woke up I found this on the computer screen:


What an amazing cat! As an outdoor cat, she must have had a copy of the housekey made when I wasn't looking.

She had gone through my self-help books, and opened up Loral Langemeier's Millionaire Maker's Guide to Creating a Cash Machine for Lifeto a self-help skills assessment early in the book. So we sat down this morning and worked through it to give her some direction. This is a short version of it, so you can have an idea of what it's like:

1. List your job responsibilities:

• eating
• coyness
• sleeping
• stalking through lawn & forest as mistress of all i survey

2. List the tasks associated with these responsibilities:

• monitoring small animals
• climbing trees
• somber frolic
  

3. List the industries and markets you have experience in:

• pets
• hunting
• food service

4. List the tasks you do at home:

• tongue-bathing
• resting
  

5. List the activities you find you do in spare time

• rubbing face against lawn furniture
• marking territory
• leering at Mr MacMuffin through his living room window, especially at night when the terror sets in

6. List the tasks others ask you to help them w/

• pest control
• relationship problems
• money problems
• emotional problems
• family problems

7. List the tasks you're good at & may take for granted

• sharpening claws
• furniture control
• consulting.
  

That's her list. Honestly, I'm a little surprised at some of her answers, but she is an outdoor cat, after all. And the Cash Machine book is interesting-- I'll have my full review up tomorrow!